


Scarlet Garden

by kaitain



Category: Baten Kaitos, Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 16:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1310866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaitain/pseuds/kaitain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the odor of violets given off by a decomposing body.</i><br/>— Jean-Paul Sartre, “La Nausée”</p><div class="center">
  <p><i>(</i> Someone lies dying in the grove where those roses grow, a body sacrificed to the flowers. <i>)</i><br/></p>
</div>a very weird, indulgent crossover au fic written for fan's birthday (3/12/14).
            </blockquote>





	Scarlet Garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FanFanGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=FanFanGirl).



>  
> 
>   
> 
> 
> this giftfic is dedicated wholeheartedly to fan and inspired in part by her amazing writing. in fact, one of my favorite fics of hers that she wrote for me lends this fic (with permission!) its altered first line. thank you for all your years of friendship and everything you've done for me, fan! i love you, big sis. ♥
> 
> one day, a few months back, we were talking about how weird it would be if piter were a baten kaitos character (an au of which this fic is an au of, actually), and then i just got... kind of carried away thinking about how weird melodia is, and _then_... this happened. it's basically a big plant-guro psychodrama, and being familiar with an obscure 10 year old jrpg is actually pretty necessary to understanding the fic as a whole— there are a lot of baten kaitos spoilers! (for the record, while piter and melodia are the key characters and basically the only characters in this, in noooo way is this fic meant to be shippy.)
> 
> i'm not sure if the favicons will display, but they were kind of a special (if gimmicky, maybe) part of the original presentation of the fic and i hope that they will! also, an easter egg: can you spot umman kudu and iakin nefud (the harkonnen guard captains) in this fic? they're there!
> 
> i probably need to edit this a little more (i have a problem with being very liberal and dramatic with my commas), but for the time being: enjoy!

This is not his first time meeting her. Indeed, they have met many times before, she accompanying the doting Emperor and he eager to end the dreadful useless audience— but this time, his interest is caught.  
  
She smiles at him, as she must, and curtsies, as she must, with her dainty fingers plucking regally at her skirt— and he inclines his head, as he must, feigning the appropriate response: one of deference, of a thousand unspoken pleasantries. This is the nature of the Empire; Alfard is a place of appearances, always with its façade of wafer-thin brass playing at gold. The fortress is no different. It is the heart of the Empire, buried deep in the bowels of what was once Greater Mintaka— and so it must be fortified all the stronger while it thrums with delicate life in its fragile golden ribcage. The Emperor sees to that; he considers it his duty to walk among the servants and the soldiers ensuring that they keep the veneer untarnished— not least of all before foreigners.  
  
And so, the Emperor is nowhere to be found— uncannily, though reluctantly, he adjourned elsewhere to confer with other aids and counselors on other matters, feeling that it was he who must take on the task. Dear to him though the Lady may be, he takes every opportunity to keep any hint of inadequacy from her. Piter finds it a particularly humorous matter that this little child should send the Emperor squabbling like a maid.  
  
And so, in his absence, the young Lady Melodia is alone in the warmly gilded west wing. She stands quietly in her isolation, eyes turned up toward a crest overhanging an elevator— gilded as well, like the Emperor's robes, in glittering gold thread.  
  
Of course, the young Lady Melodia is never truly alone; her isolation may never be complete so long as she is in the Fortress. Fadroh, the only slightly older fool of a general, trails behind her with his tail wagging at all times, his tongue lolling stupidly from his mouth when she flicks her red, red eyes toward him. He is outside, now, no doubt growing rabid at the notion that he cannot be beside his precious Lady, surrounding her in the tight net of his soldiers with himself situated before her as the chief knot, the one that she must lay her hands upon to slip away from.  
  
And she has slipped away— slipped her hand for a moment into Fadroh’s, curled her cold fingers around his own, and then floated off as quietly as a curling tendril of fog, stepping delicately through the hall on her own. Her heels click against the floor with gentle urgency despite her pretensions of aimlessness.  
  
Piter turns from a barred window and follows quietly, hands clasped behind his back. Her gait falters as if she has sensed him and wishes to wait for him to fall into step alongside her— and she has, perceptive child that she is. She smiles at him in the subtlest way, looking up without quite meeting his eyes, and murmurs, "It's such a lovely day, isn't it, Counselor?"  
  
Piter disagrees, but he does not say as much. "Mintaka is a grand city, to be sure," he replies, pursing his lips and inclining his head indulgently. In all truth, it is an underwhelming day: the sky is cloudy, the air is too dry, and the Emperor has been in a foul mood all morning.  
  
"Very grand," Melodia agrees, gentle and complacent as she smooths her skirt. She does not know him well, for he assumes the the Emperor speaks little of him— when Melodia visits, the topics of conversation only ever revolve around her.  
  
Geldoblame returns shortly from one end of the hall and Fadroh from the other, mercifully ending the stillborn conversation.  
  
"My Lady!" The General cries happily, sweeping a bow so low that it nearly drags his forelock along the floor. "I am so very glad to see you— have you been well?"  
  
The Lady parts her lips to answer, but Geldoblame interrupts: "Rise and look at her, Fadroh! Ever the picture of health." His voice softens so abruptly that Piter himself turns his gaze upon the girl to see what is so remarkable.  
  
She is and always has been dreadfully pale, but the pallor of her flesh takes on a fantastical porcelain quality paired with the red of her lips and eyes; there is life there, in her pink cheeks. There is blood in her veins, red as any other's, red as her lipstick and the ridges in her irises and the ornaments in her hair. He knows that she was ill, once— Geldoblame speaks rarely of it, but when he does, it is always with supreme bitterness and the barest hint of contempt for the Duke that could not stop it.  
  
She is more than alive, now, more than well— she is awake. Her eyes are bright and clear and calculating, and she pins each of the men before her under her discerning gaze.  
  
It comes to pass that each time she returns, the air is thin and dry and noisome, and her presence tries to curl around Piter in its silent, subtle way— because she does not know him at all, but she wants to. He can feel it flux gently as she approaches, her voice a high sweet tone that he doesn’t hear, not really; he is occupied. He is looking past her, past her porcelain face and hair of spun snow and instead to the door— and beyond it, past the General and beyond him as well, beyond even the Emperor, beyond the games they all play. He grows weary of it all, of the fragile, foul façades and veneers that they maintain. He has no time for games such as that, no time for distractions and toys.  
  
But the young Lady Melodia assures him that she is no toy.  
  


  
When Geldoblame looks away or leaves the room, Melodia’s gaze will leave him as quickly as lightning strikes. Piter finds the lightning in her eyes striking again and again upon his own flesh, singeing his hair and the crest emblazoned across his back, smiting the gilded thread, but he does not flinch. She is electric, but he believes hers to be a tame shock.  
  
He tests it when he offers her his arm and finds her hands cold and her every nail sharp. Each one he finds to be a knife seeking to pierce him through his sleeve, and so he parrys the blows with his hand over hers and smiles down at her.  
  
The bloody crescent of her lips matches his in malice as he guides her through the stale air of the fortress and passes her to the Emperor. She winds around Geldoblame’s arm, then, her serpant smile never faltering, and Piter knows that Geldoblame feels that she smiles for him.  
  
Piter knows that his emperor is wrong: the young lady smiles for them both— and for the young general, as well, and for all of Alfard and all corners of the Sky. She smiles indiscriminately with rose petals for lips, and the dew that beads on them is red and opaque and glistens only dully when she steps into the light.  
  
Someone lies dying in the grove where those roses grow, a body sacrificed to the flowers.  
  


  
Melodia leaves often, a transient spirit called back evermore through the Trail of Souls, but she always returns— and when she does, Piter reaches for the sacrifice and finds it cold and rigid. His fingertips find no pulse fluttering coquettishly beneath the thin, sallow skin— but it is there, still dying. Melodia hides it well, buries it under moss and winding vines, but it reeks as it dies, organs failing, blood souring, and the stench fills Piter's senses.  
  
Geldoblame has never killed a man by his own hand; he has not smelled decay and rot, and so he cannot recognize it. Piter senses it with utter clarity, for he still recalls the first rush of blood down his blade, the stained silver and the stained cloth and the stained flesh— and even if he wanted to escape the memory, he never could.  
  
But he does not want to.  
  
He preserves it carefully behind thick glass, and the glass case is concealed behind a veil, and the veil exists deep in Piter’s wretchedly beating heart so that only his hands may part the gauzy coif. He hides it not out of shame, but out of pride— he will not let the filthy fingers of detractors sully his only love.  
  
Its sterile chamber is more beautiful to him than Sheliak or Parnasse, than the trickery of Detourne or the barbarism of Holoholo. Not a weed will sprout there; nothing will grow, and the exhibits he wishes to look back at again and again will be preserved until his vision dims forever.  
  
The corpse there, prone on its throne behind the glass, is of little matter to him for the spirit that once inhabited it. That man’s name and face and family matter not to Piter, but his death has meant everything. His corpse is preserved in the place where it fell, on Elnath tile, blood still bubbling and foaming pink on its lips for Piter to admire through the glass behind his eyelids forevermore. He knows everything about it; he can still recall it in perfect clarity, even after the passage of years.  
  
The figure Melodia casts shade over is small and indistinct. He has felt it, but felt it like a blind man with fingers that merely graze the surface and eyes that will not parse what is laid out before him.  
  
He reaches again and again, fingers trembling with the strain of it, but the tips of his fingers just barely manage to brush across a frigid cheekbone lined with lichen when she smiles coyly up at him and his touch recedes.  
  


  
A morning glory dares to climb the glass.  
  
Piter tears it away, pulls it up by the roots and slips his arm from Melodia’s grasp, releases her hand as if it had never once found a place in his. He had never wanted it there to begin with; he had never wanted her shining fingernails biting into his flesh and releasing their poison into his blood.  
  
But at last, he got what he wanted. His cold fingers came to know hers— to glimpse a fragment of her purpose, to read some brief excerpt written in the language of the blind on the back of her hand.  
  
The cost of his espionage has proven grave.  
  
There are flowers now in every color, reaching for him, breathing softly in a breeze that comes from all directions at once and ruffles their petals in two, three, ten, fourteen— thirty-seven floral sighs.  
  
They grow. He pulls them out. They grow again, whispering amongst themselves, and it is when he hears their garbled words that he realizes that her hand will forevermore be a phantom in his.  
  


  
The garden is always advancing, but the vines cannot find purchase or climb the slick walls of Piter’s fortified, cavernous chest, and so there comes a point when they must stop.  
  
Melodia stops standing by his side. She no longer reaches for his arm or asks that he escort her through the Fortress. She makes her own way, slipping through the halls when the Emperor is not looking and sowing her seeds in the cracks between the tiles until it is time to leave again.  
  
The garden freezes when she departs, and stays away for a long while. It is stunted and foiled, but it will not forget its purpose.  
  


The garden thaws, and the many-colored petals all fall away and return red.  
  


  
The Lady Melodia does not return again for many months, but all the while, the flowers remain and redden every day. No longer is there a sliver of yellow or a glimpse of pale pink— only red, red as her watchful eyes. But they are without a fringe of white lashes: they are always open, always staring.  
  
Piter learns to walk among them, to step so that they pay him little mind. He learns to step lightly, taking care not to disturb their delicate little roots with his footsteps and rile the stalks and leaves and thorns that they feed. But for all the care he takes, he still tears the greenery from his precious glass exhibit— there is where it must not stray. If one stray vine were to find a crack, to _forge_ one—  
  
It is not the little girl that he fears. Melodia inspires no fear in his heart— revulsion, perhaps, and curiosity, certainly, but for all her sharpness he does not fear her. He knows that he could break her; if he wished it, he could hold her fragile head between his hands and twist until her vertebrae crackled and ground together, and her brittle fingernails scrabbling at his flesh would be powerless to stop him. The Lady Melodia could be unmade in seconds.  
  
Killing her, though, would not kill the garden.  
  
It is the garden that is fearsome, springing up where it does not belong and should never have been, privy to all the thinnest fractures in his mind. It cannot be, and yet it is: a filthy, loamy place that thinks Piter's precious souvenir another sacrifice and feeds from its blood.  
  
For the time being, the glass remains unbroken.  
  


  
It passes another month whole and strong.  
  
When Melodia returns once more in her glittering ship, the simpering General whisks her away— the Emperor is too busy for an audience, occupied with carving a warpath through the Nihal, and Piter is by his side, encircled in a net of soldiers that sweat and grunt in the sweltering heat.  
  
The plants have been gentle and dormant, shrinking from him as he passes. The Emperor's plans are coming to fruition all at once after years of stagnance, and Piter believes that the infectious sense of triumph must be what frightens them away— at last, they see Piter at his strongest and despair in the face of his might. That is what he believes.  
  
Piter is not often wrong— but this time, he is.  
  
When the Lord of the Lava Caves falls apart, so too does everything else. Piter stands back among dead soldiers as Geldoblame, raving mad and holding his trembling hands to the Sky, unleashes an unholy light and a piercing tone that nearly strikes all living things deaf and blind. The world shakes with unmatched fury and Piter stumbles, clutching at his face and mistaking sweat for blood.  
  
In the darkness, he steps on a dead man's hand and feels it twist and crunch as his boot comes down on the back of it and snaps two fingers against the rock floor of the cavern. He nearly loses his balance, and when he grinds his heels into the shivering ground for purchase he does not hear or see the man's rigid hand break five different ways, but feels it all the way up to his knee.  
  
When he regains his sight and the ringing in his ears at last begins to subside, Geldoblame looms before him, huge and monstrous, a pillar of flesh.  
  
He is drenched with blood and oozing yellow fat from a wound in what may be a flank. A long, sinewy appendage flails and licks sweat from the folds of raw, pink flesh around his many eyes— eight, Piter believes, but he cannot be sure; each is a black, filmy mass and each is staring at something different. One of the men on the ground beside Piter, paralyzed but not yet dead, turns his head toward his ruined Emperor and begins to shriek.  
  
Light bursts into the cavern without warning, and Geldoblame's eyes focus and quiver frantically as they are flooded with light. He wails something, his voice a garbled, meaty howl, and it is a moment before Piter processes the sound:  
  
" _Melodia!_ "  
  
All eyes fall upon her. The man on the ground begins to sob. Geldoblame is screaming in his ragged, garbled voice, howling about deception and betrayal, but Melodia's hideously resonant laughter overtakes him.  
  
The Lady is radiant as she glides over the rocks into heat and blood and death— and the flowers that had receded in Geldoblame's tumult burst from the ground and wind around Piter's ankles, rooting him down to behold her.  
  
He only has a moment to do so before a blow from behind fells him.  
  


Piter regains his senses in a prison cell deep within the Fortress.  
  
There is no light— the electricity has vanished without so much as a flicker and he wakes in near-total blackness, but still the brass glimmers and steams. A curl of steam finds its way through the door, left attractively ajar, and Piter follows it out and through the darkened hall.  
  
Never before has he seen the place like this. Sterile though it has always been, the Fortress has always bustled with life, with golden light and young, strong soldiers plodding their way through the ground floor and diplomats and ministers racing between elevators. Even at night, the rustling of servants and guards had been a quiet, lively force. They would acknowledge him on his way through and in and out, always with a subservient nod— and now they are nowhere to be found, and he must crawl, disoriented and furious, from a cell befitting the lowliest criminal.  
  
His mind is in shambles, struggling in its waking fog to function; he cannot recall by what force he was brought here or what happened before. There are flashes, indistinct: rock, and sand, and _red_ — and an unearthly shriek, and a white, white light. He strains his eyes in the darkness and murmurs a tame curse as he rises to his feet, percieving, just barely, a pinprick of light far away.  
  
His mind clears slowly in the darkness and hot machina gas, but before long he recalls the Lava Caves. For the time being, he cannot force his mind into objectivity— it is all still too fresh, and his mind cannot separate itself from what happened for long enough to make a clear analysis. Scenes yet flash in his memory: a tower of flesh, the report of two? three? many guns, a dark-skinned soldier with useless legs struggling and screaming on the blood-wet rocks.  
  
Slipping from the prison and into stronger light, Piter begins to remember again.  
  
Many of the soldiers the Emperor had brought were dead, killed unsealing the End Magnus, Piter's personal guard paralyzed by debris and surely dead as the rest by now. The Emperor— the Emperor is no matter any longer; what he became is not fit to rule. Those that had come to stop him, the raven and his troup— unknown. Melodia— _alive_.  
  
The garden still palpates his heart, and he realizes that it has all been an elaborate coup. Melodia— a child, yes, but a child of politics, an heir, a Duchess— has disguised herself and decieved them all with her poison fingernails and her shining, watchful eyes. "Even Piter," the Counselor breathes to himself, prying his way into an elevator. "Even I am deceived. _I_ —"  
  
He stops, realizing he is mumbling aloud; it sounds mad, but what's more: he hears Diadem in his voice, a rounding of vowels typical of the Sheliak court, and it must die. He suffocates the sound in his throat, and when it is gone, and the doors part before him on a new floor, he begins to laugh. The chuckle that sounds from him is passed back and forth in the hall, slung between machina tubes and splattered on the tiled floor, muddied by soldiers' boots.  
  
It leaves the hall at last only to be answered by a growl.  
  
The creature that advances forth is furred and feathered, yet it wears the insignia of an Imperial soldier. A tattered, ruined uniform hangs from its taloned hind legs and cinches around its torso; each of its heaving breaths nearly tears the seams. Piter's hand drops, hunting his shortsword, only to find it absent as a claw strikes out toward him and the former soldier's dripping jaws part, spraying him with spittle.  
  
Ducking beneath a wide, twisted wing as he dashes away, Piter can see a barbed tail thrashing as the soldier's human joints continue to twist and reform— one knee snaps backwards and is overtaken by scales that strip the flesh away while what is left of five fingers extends and meld into three blunt claws, pulling keratin from the host's fingernails and bone straight out from its sheath of flesh. The creature roars all the louder, but it pays no mind to Piter; as he gives his leave, turns back and watches it slam itself headfirst into the wall with a thundrous crash, splitting its howling beak and what remains of the soldier's helmet.  
  
This is more than a mere coup. As Piter passes through hall after hall, he sees more of their ruined soldiers, monstrously imitating their ruined Emperor. He hears cries of _Malpercio_ and otherworldly sounds that are more than flesh tearing or human screams, and he glimpses the same piercing, divine light with which Geldoblame had nearly struck him blind. That, he realizes, it what had stripped him of his sense: that and the high, shrieking tone that had brought the cowering garden springing back.  
  
It remains, now, stronger than ever before. It squeezes his chest and tries to take root in his lungs, but he walks as he always has: with his back rigid and his gaze steady and straight, he strides through the hall to the throne room as he always has— and finds it empty.  
  
He advances in the low light before the throne, so much like the sun by the Emperor's design, as its rays throw their light around the room in delicate gold bars— and for the first time, he does not halt at the threshhold of the throne, as he must.  
  
Piter ascends the few steps before him, moving mechanically, allowing his body to guide itself, and descends upon the throne.  
  


  


Melodia smiles truly for the first time when she sees him again. It is not the way she smiled so long ago— it is a smile that shines inexplicably, as if divinely guided, as if she cannot control it. "You've come!" She squeals, lacing her fingers over her heart. Her voice darkens, almost brooding, and with a crooked smile she murmurs, "I _knew_ you would."  
  
Piter will sit through none of her cheery salutations and stares up at her, quiet and severe. "I'll have no more of your mockery, girl. You imprisoned me," he accuses, and she laughs.  
  
" _I_?" Her tone is scandalized, and she looks down at her hands as if judging whether or not they could lift a grown man.  
  
"Your men," he amends, voice grinding with irritation that he fails to check, "imprisoned me and divested me of my weapons."  
  
"Oh, but did they not heal you," she demands, "and place you upon a bed, and leave the door ajar?" Her smile grows demure. "And did you not fling it open and come as I called?"  
  
Her manner enrages him, and the vines in his chest tighten horrible. "You?" he hisses, unable to stop an outburst. "Piter does not operate at your c—"  
  
The Lady frowns. "Yes, he does! _You do!_ " she shrills. "Else you would not have come! You know, Counselor"—and she speaks his title as intimately as his given name—"you know that the power is _all mine_ , now."  
  
Melodia holds a hand out to him, and whispers through her sugarcube teeth, "You have nowhere else to go."  
  
It pains him more horribly than anything to know that she is right, but he does not take her hand— and mercifully, she lowers it.

  
"You need not be a lowly counselor any longer," Melodia tells him as she introduces him to her Angel. It is the boy, Geldoblame's stray raven, his disappointing son— and yet it is not, and perhaps it never will be again.  
  
"You can be a Disciple, now," the Mother of God whispers, taking his arm as she used to. Her eyes are full of stardust and furious love, twisted in her uncontrollable, indiscriminate smile. "This will be more than you have ever been." She turns her head to him, staring up into the paleness of his eyes so intently that it seems as though she means to bleed her red into them. "Do you feel it?"  
  
He does.  
  
It is hideous; never has the tightness left his chest, but still he retains his posture. He will not stoop for her— he refuses. He feels the garden advancing into his bones amidst the madness all around them; the world may well be ending instead of being born anew as the flowers are where they sow their seeds too deeply inside of him to be torn out. He feels that in each shred of muscle— but when Melodia pulls away, distracted by her Angel, it subsides just a bit, and he begins to realize that what he was feeling was her, as well.  
  
She does not care any longer whether either of them respond to her endless sermons; she shrieks about completeness and divinity and life to herself, and the only preaching Piter will fold his hands to is that of the beauty of suffering. When he can, he simply meets her gaze and announces that he is leaving— examining her domain, retaking the Fortress; a mild falsehood.  
  
He always returns to the throne room. It is his, now, he realizes— Melodia never goes there; she simply does not care. It is not her darling's birthing-room, and so she does not care. It falls to Piter, and he falls into the throne with utter satisfaction.  
  
It is quiet there. Undisturbed, he can rebuild his mind and fortify his walls, the delicate glass bethel around his heart. The corpse still remains there, just before the starry altar from which Piter observes it, recalling the purity of the Sheliak clouds on the day he drove his knife into the fool's back, recalling the way he twisted the blade, recalling the way the air rushed from parted lips and a punctured lung, so much like the gusts that carried his vessel to Alfard the next morning.  
  
In the quiet, he can hear it all again. So too can he hear the Fortress creaking and steaming slowly amid the destruction of the world, as the Lady calls it. She is foolish, he believes— blind and deaf to all that does not concern the godchild. A world is worth so much more when ruled than when destroyed; more wealth, more power, more beauty that she cannot see. They will never understand each other, Piter knows, and it is better that she does not think him treasonous. The power is hers now, true— but it could very well be that Melodia, with her senseless, porcelain smiles, no longer realizes what she wields.  
  
She knows, at the very least, that there will be those that seek to stop her, to eradicate the Mother and her Angel and the rest— and Piter knows himself to be "the rest." Upon the throne, he tears ivy and blood-red flowers out of his joints and muscles and bones and comes to realize, with complete certainty, that he is not long for this world.  
  


  
Each time he returns to her, another rose is born in his chest, blooming with wide, wild petals. It is often her only greeting; she need not even glance at him to plant and water and burst the seed into a mass of dewey red. The Angel stands to her side, whiteless eyes shifting guilelessly, and pays Piter no mind, though he was once the ally of his enemy.  
  
Alignments have changed, but Piter takes it upon himself, for the sake of objectivity, to recall the world as it was. It makes him wheeze. His weighted chest longs for bygone days in which his heartbeat was not so terribly belabored.  
  
It takes only another sleepless night for the garden to find its way into the cathedral, the burying-ground of the corpse.  
  
Melodia takes his arm as she used to and remarks that she has always known him to be different from the Emperor; she has seen it always, and there was no better reason to take him for herself.  
  
"And you," Piter presses, feeling her weightlessness hanging from his arm, "have proven more candid than ever he was."  
  
Melodia smiles. "Foolish with his trust, to lend it to me and not you," she diagnoses, and falls silent for a time. Piter remains with her arm looped about his, standing like a parody of a knight.  
  
"But _you_ would have ruined him, as well," she says at last, the tremble of a giggle entering her throat.  
  
Sneering, Piter glances down at her. "As I said, my Lady: you are most candid." The thought of denying her claim never enters his head. He would have— he was determined to— but the opportunity had never presented itself, and Melodia had wrought her own and claimed it instead.  
  
"You do not trust me, do you?" She asks quietly as she begins to pull away. "That is wise." A laugh bubbles from her lips. "And that is all right— you may distrust me all you want, but know that you have already given yourself to me; you cannot take yourself back."  
  
"I am not so foolish." Piter replies, "I know very well the place I have come to occupy." Yes— he knows the throne more intimately than he believes the Emperor ever did, and he knows of her treachery and the games she plays. She has never been a toy— the world has always been hers, a ball to kick and bounce and stab the air out of.  
  
"I am _so glad,_ " Melodia whispers, and takes his hand to press it.  
  
She was weightless before, but now, with her skin against his, the heaviness of her nearly hurls him to the ground.  
  
It has been a long, long time since last he glimpsed what laid among her garden weeds, and now he sees it more clearly than ever— a prone figure, all in white and streaked with aqua where it is not coated in browns and greens. It is dead, now, to be sure: no pulse flutters; there is no flux of lung. There is only moss and dirt and curls of ivy around decrepit wrists and ankles and flowers blooming from each hole in the rotten skull, and that is all the life there is.  
  
Melodia releases him with a smile that he does not return, and the heaviness recedes again.  
  


There comes a day that she enters the throne room at last, striding forth on flower stalks instead of legs, the petals of her shawl unfurling around her shoulders. Piter looks up at her with vacant eyes, watching her smile to see him seated so comfortably where Geldoblame once sat.  
  
She parts her lips to speak, but all that he hears is shattering glass and slithering vines. His vision quivers inexplicably— but before it dims, she takes his hands in both of hers and pulls him swaying to his feet with mad strength, and he sees at last what he has been hunting for so long.  
  
The body is hers.  
  
She has sacrificed herself to the weeds and the flowers.  
  
"It's time," she whispers, again and again and again. "It's _time_."

**Author's Note:**

> if you read this without knowing what baten kaitos is, you are some kind of herculean being and i applaud you. thank you so much! i know it's pretty out there, but i had a blast writing it and i'm excited (though shy, given its strangeness and indulgent nature) about sharing it.


End file.
